Five Years and a Funeral

I was Sterling Hale's wife for two lifetimes.

The first time, I stepped between him and a stranger's knife on a wet street in the South End. I bled out on the curb while he called his mother before the ambulance.

The second time, I kept the Hale name polished through his father's stroke, his foundation's tax audit, and his affair. Vivienne signed me into McLean on a Section 12 in November and I died there in March. The last thing I heard a Hale say was, *She should have been committed years ago.*

The third time, I came out of a fourteen-month coma at thirty knowing exactly what was coming. I gave it eight weeks. Then I walked into Sterling's thirty-third birthday at the Boston Harbor Hotel in a scarlet dress and dropped the divorce petition into his buttercream.

What none of them knew. I didn't come home for a reunion. I came home for Sterling's funeral.